Megan Tower’s Design Blog

I had to slow down on my posting during the end of April and beginning of May due to my finals. I also then needed a break to do things I’ve been meaning to do for a very long time, including see friends from my hometown, spend some time outside, exercising, and most importantly, cleaning out my computer. It was time for a deep cleaning.

But now it’s time to start posting again. New features and design news posted soon!

To change the marketing concepts would almost be a blow on the great job that Ledger did in “Dark Knight.”

“If you try to honor somebody, you honor them by respecting their work and putting it out there for as many people to see. He was immensely proud of the work he did on the film. I feel a great burden to present that in an undistorted form.”
– CNN.com Article on March 15

Round of applause. Standing ovation. THANK YOU for not pulling these ads.

If you did not read my commentary on why I was so strongly against the redoing/pulling of the advertisements, make sure you click this link! No one wants me to repeat this twice. 🙂

But I must state again for those that WON’T read my old post that this marketing concept is the most ingenious I have seen for a film because it doesn’t spoil the plot (yet gives you insight into it) and it definitely makes people look AND WONDER. Isn’t that what a movie poster is supposed to do?

Wait, why didn’t anyone tell me that this was a furniture design exhibition? (Well, I never found anything directly saying that, but tags at the bottom of the gallery opener say furniture fair) The name is misleading. I find myself to already be disappointed. Sigh.

Swiss typography rocks, yo.

Anyway, I love contemporary and intuitive furniture designs. If I was good at metal and woodworking, I would totally do some furniture design.

But once again, I am disappointed with the products. A lot of them I’ve seen before or they just weren’t THAT interesting.

There were a couple things that were pretty good though (I’m trying to think on the bright side):

Not only is it kinda nice in its design, but I am a firm advocate for straying away from just your particular field of design. I say this because people need to open their eyes a bit and be more cultured about the other trends going on, but I also think that I get most of my inspiration from things that aren’t graphic design pieces; architecture, product design and fashion influence a lot of my designs. A piece of interior design that had different floors that created shadows was a form of inspiration for a newsletter I just did.

A lot of fashion designers don’t create crazy couture. Christian does. I could this playing a large role in an exhibit I’m working on that focuses on eating more fish…

Thanks for being an inspiration. You’re so fierce.

Oh, I just said that.

PS – I like this idea for a possibility for transitioning between photographs in a situation I have to work out. Hmm…

This is a reflection of a video of Khoi’s presentation at AIGA’s “Next” Convention that occurred in November 2007.

– The first thing I have to comment on in the difference between dynamic web medias and print medias is Khoi’s observation that designers has less control over the internet than print. At first, I thought that there was a lot of freedoms in both print and web but now that Khoi has brought it up, there are a lot of limitations in web. Coding can only go so far and you can’t be too organic on the web because of how a person uses and looks at the browser. There’s a box you have to work around no matter what, even if your design involves a circle.

Also, we lose control to the audience, which is something I never really thought of before to this extent. They can change how the things we made look, whereas with print, we pretty much have all of the control. They can’t change the font size on a print piece unless they physically blow it up in a much more complicated process. We have to keep in mind what people want because they know they can change things whereas we could “force them” (for lack of better word) to look at what we want them to look at. If we wanted them to look at Avant Garde, they looked at Avant Garde. That’s not so much the case anymore with web.

– “If we give people what they say they want, they’ll never get what they know we need.” I’ve thought this since we learned that the customer is not always right, but it’s interesting to see that he believes this in a different view than I have.

– The comment on MySpace : YES. Agreed. It is what is destroying design and I believe that is how many people think they can do graphic design. Sometimes, I do believe the internet has been a determent to the industry we’re in.

– Wow, I feel old. I remember the days when I had to “download a font” to go into a certain site or suffer the wrath of not doing it. And yes, Cooper Black was one of those fonts. And yes, I’m guilty to have created one of those myself (but I asked for courier new as it was my emphasis font back when I made my first website in 2000). I laughed really hard for a really long time.

– JK Rowling’s site (featured under the “they will figure out how to use sites over time”) was always a difficult subject for me. I had to go find “cheat codes” how to navigate the site. I actually had asked someone who wasn’t as web savvy to navigate the site and they got frustrated. Unless you’re used to finding difficultly placed items or are one of those people that have too much time on your hands, sites like these often get overlooked.

– The Speech/Conversation issue was interesting. I won’t go into too much because that would be a ridiculous amount of web space, but it’s so true that print design is like speeches (one sided) and conversation is like web (has other aspects that can respond back).

– I am shocked by the thought of grids going through the W3C. ANOTHER THING I hafta make sure I make clean code on!? I admit I am slightly scared by this development. I’ll research this more later.

Overall, this presentation opened my eyes to something that I hadn’t really given too much thought to. Now I’ll be thinking about this more. It just shows me more and more that even though we make what people want, we really have to focus that on the web. They can change that more than they can print.